Literature Review

Reading and Reception of Digital LiteratureJim Barrett

Books

Brenda Laurel (Ed.), The Art of Human Computer Interface Design (Reading, MA; Addison-Wesley Professional, 1990)This is a collection of essays on interaction between digital software and human users sponsored by the Apple Corporation. The Art of Human Computer Interface Design is, however, important as it includes texts dealing with cultural, social and semiotic meanings of digital literature. Design here is positioned not only as material assembling but as a means of meaning creation.

Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the History of Writing (Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Bloom and Associates, 1991)Bolter begins his examination of writing for digital media that is continued by Remediation in 1999. By looking at the history of what he terms “print culture” he traces the development of writing media to the point we are at in 1991 which he describes as “the late age of print”. Writing Space as well introduces the concept of Remediation, here in the context of print media. This is an important text as it establishes digital literature in a broader context than only the techno-materialistic, which had been dominant in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Bolter argues that computer based writing is both a cultural product and producer.

Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds: Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)Ryan examines digital media in terms of the narrative systems through the concept of fiction as creating possible worlds (“the actual world of a recentered system of reality”). The work relies on traditional structural narrative theory as applied to paper texts, using terms such as plot, character, voice and frame. Possible Worlds opened up the debate of the 1990s on narrative and game play, the usefulness of established disciplinary tools in understanding new media and that stories can be told using digitally mediated language and image systems.

George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992)Landow’s text is the first of his three ongoing editions (1992, 1997, and 2006). In this edition Landow examines digital media as the culmination of postmodernist literary theory (such as Lyotard, Barthes, Derrida, and Bakhtin). Landow takes up themes also found in Bolter, such as non-linearity, the altered subjectivity of the reader (such as those of Barthes’ readerly and writerly text types), and intertextuality. It is an overly utopian

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account of digital media but it is the beginnings of literary critique of language constructions in digital texts.

Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theater (Reading MASS: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1993) A systematic examination of how stories can be told using computers if theater studies and new media theory are combined. I read Computers as Theatre as important for the development of a specific theoretical base for digital literature. In departing from earlier theorists Laurel writes that “[a]n interface is not simply the means by whereby a person and a computer represent themselves to one another, rather it is a shared context for action in which both are agents” (xiv). This text marks a turn toward the critique of digital literature as an independent field. It raises questions about how digital media is changing the ways stories can be represented. By analyzing both design and language Laurel positions the “user” at the center of textual interpretation.

Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995)Joyce is regarded as an important figure in the development of digital literature as the author of Afternoon: A Story (Eastgate Systems, 1990). Afternoon has been discussed in several of the texts listed here; Espen Aarseth, J. Yellowlees Douglas, Jay David Bolter (along with Joyce a co creator of Storyspace the authoring software developed by Eastgate), George Landow, Jill Walker and Anna Gunder all critique the work. Joyce’s own critical style is very personal and poetic but he makes several relevant points regarding the role of the reader in the digital text. In the chapter A Mephite Topography: Governance and the City of Text, the reader of a digital text is constructed as participating in an interactive and spatial topography (Gr. topos: place, graphein: to draw). The concept of “the city of text” (pp108-109) continues to be relevant with the more visual and spatial reader driven (‘interactive’) digital texts that began to emerge in the 1990s and that exist today.

Warren Chernaik, Marilyn Deegan and Andrew Gibson (Eds), Beyond the Book: Theory, Culture and the Politics of Cyberspace (Oxford: Oxford University Computing Service, 1996)The most relevant essays regarding sociology and reception of digital text in this collection are “Connectionism and Posthumanism” by Sadie Plant and “Interactive Fiction and Narrative Space” by Andrew Gibson. Plant discusses self-organizing processes in machine based media and the implications of such processes on the humanist disciplines and philosophies. Gibson argues for the need for a postmodern understanding of narrative in light of digital media. Narrative in digital text is argued by Gibson as developing from hybrid, non-geometrical (non-structural) nodes (distributed in connected networks) and requiring performance (interactive and participatory) on the part of the readers. Themes of network or cyborg systems driving interpretation, the relevance of space and interaction and participation make this a relevant text for the sociology and reception of digital literature.

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Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge MASS: MIT Press, 1997)Murray uses a trope of the bard to describe interaction with digital texts. Each time a story is retold with reader driven digital media it is done so a little differently but around a basic formula. Issues of reader and text agency are discussed, with mimesis being the focus for narrative theory. Another important element of the text is its examination of narratives being translated across media, such as from book to film to computer game. Murray introduces the concept of “Procedural authorship” (Murray 152) whereby authorship is “writing the rules by which the text appears as well as writing the text themselves”. This is later taken up by Ryan in Narrative as Virtual Reality (2001).

George P. Landow Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997)In Hypertext 2.0 Landow continues the analysis of hypertext using cultural and literary theory under the umbrella of the postmodern. The World Wide Web has now become important. While Bakhtin was mentioned in passing in the first Hypertext (1992) here the tool of dialogism is developed somewhat as a theory for hypertext. Also the process of reading hypertext is discussed with significant control over the text being placed with the reader/consumer.

Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)Aarseth’s adaptation of his PhD thesis at Bergen University is recognised as a pivotal work in critical theory of digital literature. It is an examination of what constitutes narrative in the Aristotelian sense and how close digital texts, particularly participatory fiction such as role playing games, come to it. Aarseth builds his own terminology and concentrates on the materials of the text as permitting and forming certain forms of expression. The concept of the reader is abandoned in favour of a participant in the cybertext which requires a “non-trivial effort” on the part of the user. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Hayles approaches digital texts in terms of embodiment in How We Became Posthuman. Reading is a physical act based upon the human perceptual apparatus. The reader engages with digital texts in a material relationship, as a type of cyborg. Readers can understand the subjective states asserted by such texts because of earlier modernist and postmodernist literature that described and depicted such physical conditions. Authors cited by Hayles to support this include William S. Burroughs, Italo Calvino, and Phillip K. Dick. Reader response is therefore part of a broader dialogue than just the interface based experience but rather extends out into cultural, social and historical systems of knowledge.

Marie-Laure Ryan (Ed), Cyberspace Textuality, Computer Technology and Literary Theory (Bloomingdale: Indiana University press, 1999)Ryan’s collection of essays includes texts by Espen Aarseth, Katherine Hayles and Ryan herself. As well as the essays by these three authors, Postorganic Performance: The

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Appearance of Theatre in Virtual Spaces by Mathew Causey is important in relation to the sociology and reception of digital literature. Aarseth writes on the need for new approaches to digital literature and outlines his own system of ergodic literature as an example of new critiques for new media. Hayles discusses how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be dealt with as a text. The AI attributes of “bottom up” development (from simple to complex), “complex feedback loops” and “self organization” (Hayles 1999:207-208) combined with pattern/randomness “as a generative dialectic of cultural forms” (Ibid. 209) are the key concepts for Hayles’ reading of artificial life in the context of literary culture. Ryan develops a taxonomical approach to the concepts of Narrative, Virtual and Text, constructing detailed tables for each in comparisons with “postmodern aesthetics” (Ryan 1999: 103). Finally Causey argues for a Posthuman approach to narrative by re evaluating the concept of performance. Using visual and cultural theory Causey examines the sign as occupying and altering both the virtual and the real simultaneously.

Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge Mass. MIT Press 1999)Bolter and Grusin’s text is important for its theory of remediation. This is based on the idea that in order to understand new media (“cultural practices with the computer playing a central role as the medium for production, storage and distribution” - Wikipedia) it is necessary to realized that older media forms are “refashioned” through dialogues with new media. This is a bidirectional process with such practices as reading being learnt from old media, then altered through exposure to new media, which then in turn alters reading practices of old media. Remediation theory is very influential and plays a major role in Katherine Hayles work on Intermediation (Hayles 2006).

Michael Joyce, Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000)Here Joyce, in often abstract prose, looks at the reading of text based interactive MOOs (Multi user dungeons Object Orientated) as examples of networks. Joyce discusses such themes as presence and embodiment, time, collaborative texts, links and reading. He relies heavily on the theory work of Helene Cixous, quoting from it extensively. In regards to the sociology and reception of digital literature Othermindedness discusses dialogues that move in and around texts. Joyce acknowledges that meaning is a process and is very much concerned with culture, rather than just the sign or the material of the media. Joyce also dialogues with J. Yellowlees Douglas, quoting from her works and supporting many of her assertions concerning digital textuality.

J. Yellowlees Douglas, The End of Books – Or Books without End? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000)Douglas follows a similar critical path to those taken thus far by Bolter, Joyce, Ryan, Murray and Aarseth. In regards to the reading paths this approach analyses the digital text as presented physically by links, chunked text, visual and written content, and the hierarchy and structure of the whole. Douglas favors the language of traditional narrative theory and as the title suggests, the digital text is situated in terms of an evolution of literature as linear from books. According to Douglas digital texts liberate the reader and

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his or her “convictions, predictions, and interpretations make a difference to the text itself” (35). The reception theories of Wolfgang Iser are invoked by Douglas, but only in terms of semiotic indeterminacy, the so-called “gaps”, “blanks” “vacancies” and “negations” found in the text, to which the reader must contribute their own understanding to read the text (29). The figure of the implied reader is not mentioned and reading is reduced to a functional level of direct interpretation by the actual reader.

Sarah Sloane, Digital Fictions: Storytelling in the Material World (Stamford; Ablex Publishing Group, 2000)Digital Fictions examines reading and writing by concentrating on the participatory forms of the MUD (Multi User Dungeon), MOO and MUSH (Mutually Shared Hallucination) which run in real time with many authors. Sloane takes up a more specific critical approach beyond the general appeals to post-structuralism that are made in many of the texts discussed above. Rhetoric, semiotic and feminist theory are the tools of Sloane. “Storytelling” is the general direction of this text. The reception theories of Wolfgang Iser are discussed by Sloane. In relation to Iser, Digital Fictions focuses on the “gaps” which go toward accommodating the implied reader in the text, Sloane judges these “gaps” as a method “insufficient for the task of encompassing the digital fictions under discussion in this volume”. By incorporating rhetoric theory and semiotics Sloane attempts to describe the “widely distributed, idiosyncratic, culturally based audiences who read digital fictions” (163). The theories of M.M. Bakhtin are judged to be of more relevance to digital fiction literature. Sloane adapts Bakhtin’s translated terms “horizon” and “environment” (incidentally from a 1993 translation done by Lev Manovich of a lesser known essay, “The Spatial Form of Character”) to apply in a semiotic relation of outside world (environment) as corresponding with an internal concept (horizon) for a reader.

Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave 2001)The focus for Radiant Textuality is the implications and impacts of digital technology on the practices, teaching and future directions for the Humanities. McGann primarily concentrates on English literature and how its study should be developed in light of digital textuality. In its examination of digital textuality, Radiant Textuality states that “Texts are like fractal derivations” (151). It is these fractals that McGann is interested in, or how a digital text has become distributed and transformable (he uses the term “deformations” for alterations or transformations and the resulting comparative studies between the pre and post altered text). This practice of deformation is argued as bridging the material (signifieds) with the imaginative and subsequently cultural meanings of a text (McGann 2001: 115). McGann breaks his study into three periods; 1993-95, 1995-99 and 1999-2000 and this roughly corresponds to first, second and third generations of hypertext and to trends in digital critical theory. The first period is summarized as “The Rational of Hypertext”, the beginning again for the humanities under new technological regimes and what authors, readers and critics will be as a result. The second period provides some of the answers posed in the first period and it is here that McGann explains deformation. Finally the short year of the millennium turn looks at the how book

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will be situated in relation to new digital technologies. Reading is central to McGann’s rational for deformation and is described in terms of reading across texts in order to develop meaning. McGann terms this “reading backward” and gives the example of needing to be familiar with several of Dante’s poems in order to understand a single text (Ibid. 107). As well there is, according to McGann, no text that is not marked by cultural and reader expectations and “normalizations” (Ibid. 204). Reading is a complex network of practices and interpretations and digital technologies allow us to better examine these as humanist scholars.

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press 2001)Manovich’s text is a detailed account of the theories, philosophies and relationships concerning new media, culture and language. The critique is not restricted to literary theory but includes visual and film theory, art theory and media specific analysis. Manovich discusses how cultural forms of understanding feed into digital media, such as the concept of ‘frame’ and how “as we shift from an industrial society to an information society, from old media to new media, the overlap between producers and users becomes significantly larger” (119). Manovich goes on to apply this to the materials of new media production, the relationship between “typical media objects” and the way they are used. Analysis of digital text is based very much on intended use as articulated by authors under regimes of capitalist production and consumption. The difference according to Manovich with “new” media is that the capitalist system in now post-industrial and information based. The Language of New Media introduces the ‘cut and paste’ remix culture that is central to digital textuality today. It is reader/user driven and blurs old media distinctions between author and text consumer. Manovich argues that digital cut and paste, fades and manipulations are anti-montage as they create “continuous spaces out of different elements” that present as coherent wholes (155). The viewer/reader is included in this seamless whole.

Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001)Ryan continues to examine digital media in terms of narrative and the traditions of narratology. This text is critical of postmodern approaches to narrative and media, exemplified by such statements as “the frenetic world of postmodernism is not the only way to reconcile the two metaphors” (199) The two metaphors are immersion and interactivity, which Ryan constructs as points along a continuum that meet only in relational tension. Immersion is allied with what could be described as the readerly text, whereby the reader is carried along by the media in a passive but absorbed state. Interaction is described by Ryan as resulting in a type of open work (Ryan does reference Umberto Eco) that requires effort on the part of the reader. The efforts of the reader are in regard to the “unpredictable consequences of interactivity that plunge the text into chaos and leave the reader to decide whether to try to put it put it back together as cosmos or to maintain it in its chaotic state by reading it on a purely local level” (329-30). This summary of interactivity can be compared with Ryan’s description of immersion as “the experience of a pure mind that floats above all concrete worlds in the ethereal universe of semantic possibility (354).

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2001: Lars Qvortrup (Ed), “Virtual Interaction in Virtual Inhabited Worlds”

N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge MASS: MIT Press, 2002)At the center of Hayles’ 2002 text is the concept of materiality. Hayles asserts that “We are not generally accustomed to think of a book as a material metaphor, but in fact it is an artifact whose physical properties and historical usages structure our interactions with it in ways obvious and subtle” (22). In order to use materiality as an analytical tool Hayles outlines a system of “Media Specific Analysis” (MSA) that involves analyses of both content, contexts (historical, social etc) and material form of a text. Hayles claims that “MSA explicitly refutes the concept of the literary work that emerged from the eighteenth century debates over copyright and that has held considerable sway since then” (31). The work of an author is only realized in the reception of the text in its embodied form. This is an emergent process that allows for a literary work to move over different media and through time. Rather than an author releasing their creation by “mixing his intellectual labor with the materials afforded him by nature” the process of creating meaning goes on in a dynamic network of cultural social and historical connections realized through interaction with the materials of the text. The second half of Writing Machines attempts to apply the theory of the first half to a number of digital and non-digital texts. These texts include a ‘remixed’ Victorian novel, artist’s books, the digital text From Lexia to Perplexia and the collage postmodern novel House of Leaves.

Lisa Yaszek, The Self Wired Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative (New York: Routledge 2003)

Mark Stephen Meadows, Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative (Indianapolis: New Riders Press, 2003)Pause and Effect continues the line, begun by Brenda Laurel in The Art of Human Computer Interface Design, of considering design as a relevant factor in the reception and sociology of digital literature. Meadows gives a historical account of visual perspective in the western artistic tradition and proposes an expanded definition of narrative to accommodate the active participation of the reader in the creation of the story. Narrative in Pause and Effect is primarily a visual experience and therefore Meadows spends a lot of pages going over Point of View (POV) and perspective, mostly in art, comics and commercial forms of media (e.g. advertising). It reads a lot like a manual on how to write interactive narratives using digital media and Meadows does include interviews with working designers and writers. The reader is the center for the type of design that Meadows is proposing, often called “experience design” and it is described in spatial, symbolic, participatory/performative and cultural/historical terms. In an interview with “one of the inventors of virtual architecture”, Marcos Novak states that “The symbolic can only guarantee half the communication – if that. What artists add is the concern for the other half, all the continuous things…the lighting, and distance and placement…the balancing act. There are two acts we engage in: discreet and symbolic” (184). In digital literature it is not only the symbolic that conveys meaning but the interaction or interplay between the reader/enactor and the text. How the work is designed directs the reader/enactor to respond in certain ways and this is a primary concern of the type of design theory discussed by Meadows in Pause and Effect.

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2003: Jan Van Looy, Jan Baetens, “Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Literature”Before there was Dovey and Kennedy’s Game Cultures (2006) Van Looy and Baetens’ Close Reading New Media provided the closest thing to a manual for the analysis of digital texts as literature..

2003: Barry Atkins, “More than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional From”

2003: Nick Montfort, “Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction”

N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)In My Mother was a Computer, Hayles looks at “the entanglement of the bodies of texts and digital subjects” in a blend of the themes of earlier works, Writing Machines and How we Became Posthuman (7). This is a major strand in what Hayles describes as Intermediation, the movements between texts and bodies and between different forms of media (intermediation). Intermediation makes it necessary “to think in terms of multiple causalities, complex dynamics and emergent possibilities” (7). In this context language, whether the words on the page or those processed by computers are all forms of code. In order to interpret this code it is necessary for the reader to run multiple processes simultaneously. The reader, in terms of intermediation, is a complex, distributed and dynamic figure as she is called upon to interpret and respond to symbolic communication as well as structures and flows between and within media. In discussing the digital art installation I Have Never Read the Bible, Hayles describes “reading” as “a distributed activity taking place partly in the articulations of the artist, partly in the “voiced” text, partly in the Oreo [layered] structures of the scanner, computer and synthesizer and partly in the perception of the viewer who not only makes words out of the voiced letters but also makes meaning out of her interpolation into this distributed cognitive environment” (213). This model of dynamic participation and simultaneous interpretation provides an image of the reading subject as implied by both the language and the material features of the text.

2006: George P. Landow, “Hypertext 3.0 Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization”Landow’s third edition of Hypertext is another encyclopedic account of digital textual forms. There is much in the text which is essential background information for anyone moving into the subject areas of critical theory and new media. To illustrate Landow’s approach to theory one example is:

“Wreaders” (p302) “active aggressive readers who can and do add links, comments and their own subwebs to the larger web into which the print version ahs transformed itself”

The concept of ‘active reader’ is found in Umberto Eco’s work and he adopted in from Roland Barthes. In this example the general lineage of Landow’s approach can be

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determined. Hypertext 3.0 is based on critical and pedagogical theory and uses the terms author, co author, reader and wreader. Materiality is also very central to Landow:

“I tell my students to be prepared for readers who ‘fall in through the living room ceiling rather than entering through the front door’, and therefore at least consider including navigation and orientation devices that will give readers some idea of where they have landed.” (Landow 111)

This is clearly a spatial critique of the text which I have sound is often a helpful way of working with digital literature. Landow continues on with some of the utopian vision of digital communication, such as “hypertext blurs the distinction between reader and author (327). These statements do not necessarily add to the understanding of how hypertext works. Hypertext 3.0 touches on a plethora of critical theory and theorists; Bakhtin, Hayles, Derrida and Iser are just a few.

2006 Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006) While much of Dovey and Kennedy’s text is concerned with game theories, there is a strong focus of how digital artifacts are to be analyzed as new media. Game Cultures adopts an approach with a sociological flavor. Central to this is the concept of ‘Technicity’; “the new kinds of social and cultural relationships being formed through the use of technology (Dovey and Kennedy 16). The relationship between the user and the digital artifact is qualified by Dovey and Kennedy as “games are not static media texts – they are activities.” (23). What is interactivity is discussed in terms of the interaction with the material properties of game as texts and in terms of the cultural experience needed to interpret their meanings. Technicity remains the umbrella term for these investigations, “the cultural system of determination refers to the ways in which tastes, class, ‘race’, and, most crucially in this case, gender all generate particular kinds of technicity” (60). Dovey and Kennedy “proceed from the assumption that the meaning of computer technology, and by extension computer games, is not embedded in the technology or artifact itself but is always brought about by a set of cultural processes through which meanings are generated and contested. “(65) The only practical example of their model of analysis is performed with a games development company. There is however an “Analytical Framework for games Studies” set out in Dovey and Kennedy’s text (120-22) This model proposes a close reading of both the ‘front end’ (the game and how it is played, addressivity ) and the ‘back end’ (the programming of the game, contexts to play, feedback, production history). This model for analysis leads to the judgment that “computer games can be seen as prototypical of new media economies insofar as they are an excellent example of the shift from a participatory media culture (see Jenkins 1992) to what games theorist Sue Morris, talking about FPS [First Person Shooters] has termed a ‘co-creative’ media form” (123).

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Theses1985: Mary Anne Buckles “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame Adventure”

1998: Jill Walker “Hypertextual Criticism: Comparative Readings of Three Web Hypertexts about Literature and Film”

2000: Raine Koskimaa, “Digital Literature: From Text to Hypertext and Beyond”

2003: Lisbeth Klastrup, “Towards a Poetics of Virtual Worlds – Multi-User Textuality and the Emergence of Story”

2003: Torill Elvira Mortensen, “Pleasures of the Player: Flow and Control in Online Games”

2004: Anna Gunder “Hyperworks: On Digital Literature and Computer Games”

2006: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, “Expressive Processing: On Process-Intensive Literature and Digital Media”

Article and Collections:2003: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Nick Montfort (Eds), “The New Media Reader”2003: Mark J.P. Wolf, Bernard Perron, “The Video Game Theory Reader”2004, Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”2004: Marie-Laure Ryan (Ed), “Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling”2004: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Pat Harrigan, “The New Media Reader”2006: Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (Eds), “New Media Poetics Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories”

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